WMU Photography & Intermedia Course Extension Blog

Image Credit: Jonathan Gitelson, The Green Dolphin Street
Jonathon Gitelson, Chicago, IL

The Car ProjectDuring the summer of 2004, I moved across the street from the Funky Buddha Lounge, a popular nightclub in Chicago’s West Loop Neighborhood. Each night I would park my car on the street and each morning I would find that numerous club fliers had been shoved beneath my windshield wipers and into the cracks of my windows. By the time I got to my car each morning, many of the other car owners had already left for the day, discarding their fliers on the ground. This form of advertising intrigued me – an attempt at communication with consumers that was clearly failing, creating huge volumes of what was essentially expensively printed instant garbage.Shortly after I moved in, I began collecting the fliers from my car and from the sidewalk around my home. By the winter of 2004/2005, I had collected over 1000 fliers, enough to cover my entire car. I spent three months hand-sewing the fliers together to create a car cover and have photographed the car, with car cover, parked in front of the clubs from whom I had received fliers.“The Car Project” was completed in December of 2005 and consists of eight large-scale photographs. Each exhibition print is digitally printed at 40” X 50” which allows the viewer to read the individual fliers within each photograph.

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